Doctor Pascal | Page 8

it please
you if they tell you that your nephew is degenerate; that he reproduces
from four generations back, his great-great-grandmother the dear
woman to whom we sometimes take him, and with whom he likes so
much to be? No! there is no longer any family possible, if people begin
to lay bare everything--the nerves of this one, the muscles of that. It is
enough to disgust one with living!"
Clotilde, standing in her long black blouse, had listened to her
grandmother attentively. She had grown very serious; her arms hung by
her sides, her eyes were fixed upon the ground. There was silence for a
moment; then she said slowly:
"It is science, grandmother."
"Science!" cried Felicite, trotting about again. "A fine thing, their
science, that goes against all that is most sacred in the world! When
they shall have demolished everything they will have advanced greatly!
They kill respect, they kill the family, they kill the good God!"
"Oh! don't say that, madame!" interrupted Martine, in a grieved voice,
her narrow devoutness wounded. "Do not say that M. Pascal kills the
good God!"
"Yes, my poor girl, he kills him. And look you, it is a crime, from the
religious point of view, to let one's self be damned in that way. You do
not love him, on my word of honor! No, you do not love him, you two
who have the happiness of believing, since you do nothing to bring him
back to the right path. Ah! if I were in your place, I would split that

press open with a hatchet. I would make a famous bonfire with all the
insults to the good God which it contains!"
She had planted herself before the immense press and was measuring it
with her fiery glance, as if to take it by assault, to sack it, to destroy it,
in spite of the withered and fragile thinness of her eighty years. Then,
with a gesture of ironical disdain:
"If, even with his science, he could know everything!"
Clotilde remained for a moment absorbed in thought, her gaze lost in
vacancy. Then she said in an undertone, as if speaking to herself:
"It is true, he cannot know everything. There is always something else
below. That is what irritates me; that is what makes us quarrel: for I
cannot, like him, put the mystery aside. I am troubled by it, so much so
that I suffer cruelly. Below, what wills and acts in the shuddering
darkness, all the unknown forces--"
Her voice had gradually become lower and now dropped to an
indistinct murmur.
Then Martine, whose face for a moment past had worn a somber
expression, interrupted in her turn:
"If it was true, however, mademoiselle, that monsieur would be
damned on account of those villainous papers, tell me, ought we to let
it happen? For my part, look you, if he were to tell me to throw myself
down from the terrace, I would shut my eyes and throw myself,
because I know that he is always right. But for his salvation! Oh! if I
could, I would work for that, in spite of him. In every way, yes! I
would force him; it is too cruel to me to think that he will not be in
heaven with us."
"You are quite right, my girl," said Felicite approvingly. "You, at least,
love your master in an intelligent fashion."
Between the two, Clotilde still seemed irresolute. In her, belief did not
bend to the strict rule of dogma; the religious sentiment did not
materialize in the hope of a paradise, of a place of delights, where she
was to meet her own again. It was in her simply a need of a beyond, a
certainty that the vast world does not stop short at sensation, that there
is a whole unknown world, besides, which must be taken into account.
But her grandmother, who was so old, this servant, who was so devoted,
shook her in her uneasy affection for her uncle. Did they not love him
better, in a more enlightened and more upright fashion, they who

desired him to be without a stain, freed from his manias as a scientist,
pure enough to be among the elect? Phrases of devotional books
recurred to her; the continual battle waged against the spirit of evil; the
glory of conversions effected after a violent struggle. What if she set
herself to this holy task; what if, after all, in spite of himself, she should
be able to save him! And an exaltation gradually gained her spirit,
naturally inclined to adventurous enterprises.
"Certainly," she said at last, "I should be very happy if he would not
persist in his notion of heaping up all those scraps of paper, and if he
would